editor’s choice

April 9th, 2008 · No Comments

[Edit: This post originally contained the sentence "He is also a long-time friend and vocal supporter of the Clintons," a sentence that I believed to be true. It has been brought to my attention, however, that Wilentz says he does not have a personal friendship with either Clinton despite persistent buzz to the contrary. The sentence has been changed. Thanks to Chris Shinn for the heads-up.]

Salon recently published an opinion piece by Sean Wilentz in which he claims that, if our primary system made sense, Hillary would be winning. While I will not dispute with him that the system is a mess his argument is odd and off-putting.

His central claim is that Hillary would be ahead in delegates if the states were “winner take all” in the primaries like they are in the general election.

Like many arguments for Clinton’s viability and against Obama’s, this one relies on a pretty big “if.”

As I wrote in a letter (which Salon selected as an “editor’s choice”) responding to the article, both candidates knew the rules when they entered the race and both developed strategies and tactics around those rules. If the rules had been different, the campaigns would have been run differently. Wilentz, though, presumes that the results would have been the same.

Wilentz is considered by many to be a major historian; one of his interests is the history of the presidency and its relationship to American culture more generally. His The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln was (justly) a popular and critical success, giving him an imprateur of credibility with the general public and within many segments of the academy.

He has also long been a vocal supporter of the Clintons.

I certainly don’t begrudge him those dual roles, but I do think that they have intersected in troubling ways in his recent statements. Because of his status within the academy, the cross-over popular success of his book, and the semi-celebrity status he has garnered with more recent articles in Rolling Stone ( “The Worst President in History?”) and other publications, Wilentz should probably be more careful about how he frames his work. His status as a scholar and historian link speculative, theoretically untenable work like this–and like his bizarre New Republic article wherein he claims that Obama “played the race card and blamed Hillary Clinton”– to a reputation built on more serious work. I’m not sure precisely what Wilentz should do about this, but it does seem like there should be a way to at least be transparent about affiliations, biases, methodologies, allegiances, etc.

Still, overall I am not going to begrudge a scholar his opportunity to function as a public intellectual, which we have far to few of in the U.S. I do regret that Wilentz’s recent work has been so poorly thought out, so lacking in rigor and clarity. Neither scholarly nor journalistic, these articles read like blog posts and press releases from a campaign publicist. Indeed, that’s essentially what they are.

Enough about conflicts of interest and public personae, though. Wilentz’s argument ultimately weakens Clinton because it plays into her campaign’s tendency to dismiss every victory, every strength of Obama’s as a trivial result of circumstance or quirk of the system. When he wins among the educated they claim he appeals to “latte-sipping liberals;” when he wins among the wealthy, he is appealing to people who “don’t need a president;” when he wins among blacks, they shrug and assert: “So did Jesse Jackson.”

Wouldn’t it be easy enough to make similarly dismissive, intentionally divisive statements about the states and demographics where Clinton herself has done well?

There are good reasons to support Clinton, but I am frustrated that both her supporters and her campaign continue to focus instead on fabricated reasons not to support Obama, and to dismiss out of hand his considerable accomplishments.

Ultimately, though, I think that’s part of why he’ll win. When Wilentz publishes unsupported polemics in The New Republic or in Salon, his colleagues and readers respond with more rigorous logic and more thorough research. Every time I’m told I’m only supporting Obama because I buy coffee from Starbucks, or because I’m sexist or elitist or priveleged, etc. I look deeper into his history, his accompishments, his statements, his speeches, and his policy positions, and I become more convinced that he should be the next president of the United States.